Book Review: The Last Passenger
Apr. 27th, 2020 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerDID YOU KNOW there’s been a new Charles Lenox mystery out since February??? I had not realized this, but as soon as I noticed, I remedied this situation. Charles Finch’s The Last Passenger is the last of the trilogy of prequels to the main Charles Lenox series, and I quite enjoyed it.
Many of the stalwarts of the series make excellent appearances: Graham, Edmund, Lady Jane. (There’s even a brief appearance by Thomas McConnell, though he and Lenox aren’t really friends yet.) In the Lady Jane department, I quite enjoyed the fact that Charles has become friends with her first husband - readers of the whole series will of course know that Mr. Lady Jane is doomed, but I appreciated the fact that the prequel trilogy treated him as a character in his own right, so that even though you know it’s coming, it’s nonetheless startling and sad when he actually dies.
(I maaaay have OT3ed it a bit, but honestly what else do you expect of me.)
And I also liked that in this book, Lenox falls in love with a woman who is not Lady Jane, purely because I felt a little bait-and-switched in the first prequel when Lenox spent the book obsessing about a woman named Elizabeth… who turned out to be Lady Jane, using another name for complicated Victorian reasons. As much as I love Lady Jane and Lenox together (and I do!), I also enjoy it when books allow their characters to have a romantic past in which they genuinely loved people other than their eventual beloved.
...Having said that, I didn’t totally buy that Lenox really loved Kitty. He’s certainly dazzled by her, there’s definitely a crush, but he’s not sure he loves her and so neither am I. However, it was a good college try, and also it’s clear that Lady Jane really does love her first husband, so that’s something, at least.
The mystery turns around the murder of an abolitionist (the murderers have taken some pains to hide the man’s identity, so it takes a while to figure this out), and I ended up really liking the way that the book dealt with this. I’ve read a number of books where the story shepherds the gormless character to the realization that Slavery is Bad, and it’s usually done poorly, I think because moving a character from “slavery is fine” to “slavery is evil, actually!” is such a big change that it’s hard to make the character progression plausible.
Finch makes things easier for us and himself by starting out with Lenox already believing that Slavery is Bad (which fits his previous characterization); his progression over the course of the book therefore is not so much a change of heart as a change from a fairly abstract belief to a more specific, concrete understanding as to what the badness of slavery looks like on the ground.
Many of the stalwarts of the series make excellent appearances: Graham, Edmund, Lady Jane. (There’s even a brief appearance by Thomas McConnell, though he and Lenox aren’t really friends yet.) In the Lady Jane department, I quite enjoyed the fact that Charles has become friends with her first husband - readers of the whole series will of course know that Mr. Lady Jane is doomed, but I appreciated the fact that the prequel trilogy treated him as a character in his own right, so that even though you know it’s coming, it’s nonetheless startling and sad when he actually dies.
(I maaaay have OT3ed it a bit, but honestly what else do you expect of me.)
And I also liked that in this book, Lenox falls in love with a woman who is not Lady Jane, purely because I felt a little bait-and-switched in the first prequel when Lenox spent the book obsessing about a woman named Elizabeth… who turned out to be Lady Jane, using another name for complicated Victorian reasons. As much as I love Lady Jane and Lenox together (and I do!), I also enjoy it when books allow their characters to have a romantic past in which they genuinely loved people other than their eventual beloved.
...Having said that, I didn’t totally buy that Lenox really loved Kitty. He’s certainly dazzled by her, there’s definitely a crush, but he’s not sure he loves her and so neither am I. However, it was a good college try, and also it’s clear that Lady Jane really does love her first husband, so that’s something, at least.
The mystery turns around the murder of an abolitionist (the murderers have taken some pains to hide the man’s identity, so it takes a while to figure this out), and I ended up really liking the way that the book dealt with this. I’ve read a number of books where the story shepherds the gormless character to the realization that Slavery is Bad, and it’s usually done poorly, I think because moving a character from “slavery is fine” to “slavery is evil, actually!” is such a big change that it’s hard to make the character progression plausible.
Finch makes things easier for us and himself by starting out with Lenox already believing that Slavery is Bad (which fits his previous characterization); his progression over the course of the book therefore is not so much a change of heart as a change from a fairly abstract belief to a more specific, concrete understanding as to what the badness of slavery looks like on the ground.
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Date: 2020-04-27 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-27 10:51 pm (UTC)